Introduction

Over the past decade, the concept of resilience has become a centre-piece of international development and humanitarian strategy and practise. Development practitioners and organisations argue that the term has intuitive appeal as a way to address climate change and other ecological and social volatility, while bridging the artificial divide between humanitarian relief and development aid (Walsh-Dilley, Wolford, & McCarthy, 2013). They also suggest that resilience thinking enables a focus on strengths and opportunities, reorienting the conversation within impoverished communities where the usual focus is on maladjustment and deficiency. Despite its popularity, however, there is widespread concern over how to define and operationalise resilience. The malleability of the term has led to critiques from many sides: for example, that definitional failure allows the resilience concept to be used in imprecise ways that do more harm than good in development practise (Brand & Jax, 2007; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012) and that resilience can thus be used to support or justify the further extension of neoliberal ideologies into development practise (Joseph, 2013; Reid, 2012;Walker & Cooper, 2011; Watts, 2011). A resultant search for definitional precision and measurement principles (e.g. Alinovi, Mane, & Romano, 2010; Barrett & Constas, 2014) seeks to forge resilience as a more technical object, specifying the concept in precise and measurable ways, and making it clear and operationalisable to improve its impact on development practise1 (Carpenter, Walker, Anderies, & Abel, 2001; Frankenberger, Langworthy, Spangler, & Nelson, 2012).

In this introduction, we explore the conceptual confusion around resilience within the development field. Ultimately, we argue that the lack of clarity and the related moment of collective searching present a unique opportunity and productive space of engagement for rethinking what really matters for development. Indeed, it potentially provides opportunities to look beyond dominant knowledge paradigms to engage in non-hegemonic ‘border thinking’ (Mignolo, 2000). In an industry such as development that is heavily reliant on standardised toolkits and narrow interventions that can be taken ‘to scale’ to achieve targets defined universally (reduce hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy), the opportunity for complex thinking provided by such epistemic ambiguity is rare.

We see resilience as itself an object of inquiry rather than simply a technical category or framework for analysis. We suggest that there is much to be learned by illuminating resilience as a social configuration, not a fixed or self-evident entity (McMichael, 1990). How resilience is defined, conceptualised, operationalised – and the impacts these configurations have – is neither objective nor innocent. Indeed, the deployment of resilience within development practise reflects a normative understanding of the concept, grounded in two prevalent but often hidden assumptions (Beymer-Farris, Bassett, & Bryceson, 2012; Hornborg, 2009). The first hidden assumption relates to a supposed universal consensus about the meaning of resilience, even if it is hard to articulate. It is assumed that there is a single objective meaning to the term, if only it could be adequately specified. Second, resilience is often assumed to be universally beneficial. Of course, once exposed as assumptions, it is easy to debunk both. Not only can undesirable states, systems or institutions also be highly resilient – and resilient systems can be highly unequal with the benefits from such resilience unevenly distributed – but the lack of consensus reflects diverse conceptions of resilience and priorities for resilience building effort. This diversity is not simply a product of not having specified the terrain clearly enough or a product of people being ignorant of how to articulate resilience properly. Rather, the diversity is generated in and by differences in subject positions, contexts and experiences: people see things differently. When scholars and practitioners embrace singular definitions of resilience, they are often privileging dominant voices within any given community, though often without explicit recognition or acknowledgement.

The articles in this collection begin from a shared interest in examining the process of meaning-making around resilience. They were all generated through a collective research process motivated by the desire to understand what forms of knowledge and practises the concept of resilience makes possible or elides, and what sorts of tensions are produced or reproduced through resilience thinking. Resilience is a ‘boundary object’; it opens up new spaces for discussion and knowledge formation across and outside of traditional disciplinary formulations. As Karl Zimmerer points out (this collection), it is precisely the versatility of the concept that allows resilience to create these spaces. If seen as a boundary object, resilience is productive precisely because it resists epistemological closure. That is, the articles in this special issue examine not what resilience is but what resilience as a motivating discourse does, and conversely how meanings around resilience come to be.

The productive potential of epistemic ambiguity

Contemporary resilience thinking has its roots in a number of academic disciplines, most notably ecology, psychology and disaster studies (see Walsh-Dilley et al., 2013). In ecology, where this concept has arguably been most developed, resilience thinking presents a significant epistemic challenge to existing ecological knowledge. It pushes against old forms of command-driven ecosystems management, calling for new approaches to ecological governance (Andereis, Walker, & Kinzig, 2006; Holling, 1973, 1978; Scoones, 1999; Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004). Among its more radical propositions, the resilience framework questions the role of scientific expertise in ecosystems management, suggesting that social–ecological systems resilience relies on diverse forms of knowledge at all scales, not just top-down principles from experts. Resilience scholars insist that polycentric, multilevel governance is necessary to harness the various sources of knowledge that contribute to resilience capacity (Folke, 2006). They emphasise the incomplete, fragmentary and provisional nature of scientific knowledge (Scoones, 1999). In this ‘new ecology’ (Zimmerer, 1994), systems resilience is seen as a ‘complex process of epistemic negotiation in different settings’ (Scoones, 1999, p. 495; Wynne, 1996) – a significant change in how social, economic and ecological processes are imagined and understood.

Many concepts in ‘Development studies’ have been critiqued for being ambiguous or imprecise. But uncertainty is central to the resilience concept in unique ways. First, resilience thinking is oriented precisely around unknown future shocks and variability – resilience studies in social–ecological systems theory is called ‘the science of surprise’ (Folke, 2006). Coping with this uncertain future will, resilience scholars suggest, require responses that are outside of our existing or dominant sets of knowledge and experience. Secondly, resilience frameworks link complex systems – social and ecological systems, for example – across scales from the most miniscule to the global and even cosmic levels (Gunderson & Holling, 2002), making system limits difficult to define. Thirdly, resilience frameworks call for the inclusion of diverse stakeholders and sources of knowledge, skill, and other resources, which means that definitions, meanings and even values cannot be assumed a priori. Thus, the complexity and uncertainty that invigorates the analytical core of resilience thinking leads to a profound epistemological confusion that we find quite encouraging.

Yet, while this new framework has presented a challenge to existing ecological knowledge and management strategies, within much resilience thinking there is a failure to attend to the fact that knowledge is differentially valued and legitimised such that certain forms become dominant or even hegemonic. So while resilience scholars themselves value the contribution of lay knowledge to resilience capacity, they frequently pay little attention to how and why lay knowledges have been excluded or marginalised in favour of scientific expertise. That is, there has been a near-total lack of attention paid to power in resilience thinking, particularly as applied to development work (Walker & Cooper, 2011; Watts, 2011). Watts (2011, p. 87–88) wrote: ‘What is striking in such an integrated field of theory is that there is no point of intersection between system resiliency and virtually any contemporary account of social power or for that matter the contradictory dynamics of capitalist accumulation’. For many development organisations, the key to resilience is the self-actualising individual or community with access to market opportunities (e.g. see WRI in collaboration with UNDP, UNEP, & World Bank, 2008). This type of resilience thinking depoliticises poverty and seeks to resolve vulnerability through market mechanisms, entrepreneurship and self-exploitation. Without attention to power and conflict, resilience thinking necessarily fails to address the structural conditions of poverty and the limitations of relying on individuals who face extreme vulnerability, insecurity and violence; indeed, a depoliticised framing of resilience threatens to exacerbate such problems (Reid, 2012; see also Cooper, 2008; Miller et al., 2010). Without appropriately attending to power, the development community continues to act as a set of ‘service providers’ and humanitarians rather than as advocates or agents of transformation (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2005; Mosse, 2005; Wolford, 2011).

Acknowledging and building on these critiques, some scholars argue that there may be productive synergies between resilience thinking and a critical perspective that addresses power (Beymer-Farris et al., 2012; Turner, 2014; Widgren, 2012). In particular, political ecology approaches (Beymer-Farris et al., 2012; Leach, Scoones, & Stirling, 2010) seek to expose relations of power within resilience thinking by asking: resilience of what? By whom? To what? For what purposes? The purpose of such an approach is to excavate the ways that resilience capacity and building are not simply natural or universal, but rather terrains of contestation. While asking such questions has done much to open the ‘black box’ of resilience (Beymer-Farris et al., 2012) and expose the hierarchies and relations of power that are frequently reproduced through discourses of resilience, querying resilience to better define it still suggests that resilience is a ‘thing’ that can be uncovered if we simply ask the right questions, something that we have already suggested is misleading. This collection seeks to take this political ecology work one step further by troubling the concept of resilience itself. Acknowledging and accepting epistemic and ontological dissonance is an important step towards rethinking resilience in profoundly new and productive ways – ways that work outside of and against dominant power hierarchies.

Although a conclusive definition of resilience may provide a more ‘operationalisable’ and measurable version of resilience, such an abstraction will necessarily be insufficient to capture the concrete experiences of people who confront shocks and variability in their everyday lives (Dunn & Cons, 2014). A strong, universal conception of resilience closes our eyes to the multiplicity, contingency and context of building resilient lives on the ground, necessarily elevating the interests and knowledges of some over others. It carries with it the implicit assumption that societies, stakeholders, and communities are homogeneous and harmonious, and that there is a given consensus regarding the desirable outcomes of resilience building (Beymer-Farris et al., 2012; Hornborg, 2009). The tendency of development thinking to objectify its own mandate threatens to transform resilience thinking into a caricature of itself (‘resilient people are those who are resilient’) and leaves unquestioned the epistemic foundations upon which development practise is based. Thus, we argue that the contemporary moment of definitional uncertainty around resilience – and how we might know, measure, and evaluate it – provides a unique opportunity to contribute to a rethinking of development itself. It opens a space that helps make visible how development is itself an epistemic struggle for the reproduction of knowledge (Icaza & Vázquez, 2013), an ‘intense battlefield in the long history of colonial subalternisation of knowledge’ (Mignolo, 2000, p. 12). Highlighting the definitional confusion around resilience allows us to question the epistemic structures that normalise the order of oppressions, make visible the plurality of alternatives through which social life is organised and experienced, and break down the hierarchies and exclusions related to the dominant representations of the real (Icaza & Vázquez, 2013). Definitional efforts around resilience are engaged in the (re)production of knowledge, but they leave unquestioned the epistemic foundations upon which development practise is based.

The articles in this special issue explore what taking the epistemic challenge of resilience seriously might look like, or what would happen if the ‘objects of development’ were asked to define resilience and to explain what resilience might mean in their own lives and locations. De-colonial theories emphasise how Western religious and economic colonisation since the sixteenth century has relied upon the concurrent expansion of hegemonic forms of knowledge that legitimise(d) and reproduce(d) colonialities of power (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2000). These colonial forms were never totalising, but have nonetheless established a dominant knowledge infrastructure (Narayanaswamy, 2013) that not only privileges Western ways of knowing but discredits and denies alternatives to it. Not only is the epistemic diversity of the world immense, but this diversity must be at the core of any social justice politics (Santos, Nunes, & Meneses, 2007). Such a politics is necessary to counter the hegemony of universalist conceptions of knowledge, to expose that all knowledge is particular, situated in historical configurations of specific places, spaces and relations (Mignolo, 2014; Santos et al., 2007).

The mainstream and hegemonic knowledge paradigms deployed in development are typically market focused, and underpinned by neoliberal assumptions (Narayanaswamy, 2013). Even as development practitioners and agencies seek to use the resilience concept to think about development practise in new ways, they run the risk of simply reproducing this hegemonic thought regime; indeed as many critics point out, in some instances they already have (Watts, 2011; see also MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012; Walker & Cooper, 2011). Thinking outside of this tendency will require taking a different approach to defining resilience, an approach that looks beyond business as usual. As Mignolo (2000, p. 9) noted, ‘Alternatives to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern (Western) epistemology itself’; they require some degree of ‘border thinking’ from outside the hegemonic knowledge centres.

Countering colonial forms of knowledge, border thinking (Mignolo, 2000, 2014) is the generation of knowledge from the exterior of the modern/colonial world system that can speak to and critically reflect on the dominant knowledge infrastructure. In this special issue, we invoke border thinking as a commitment to overturn the distinction between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, prioritising the subjective visions and experiences of resilience among vulnerable groups. We suggest that these visions and experiences help us see the epistemic confusion of resilience in a new light, as a productive opportunity rather than roadblock. In particular, we find that they illuminate a set of unresolvable tensions around resilience that push back against any hopes of an objective or universal definition. This highlights the particularity of all spaces of development, requiring that more attention be paid to conjuncture, context and location.

Subjective understandings of resilience

The authors in this collection share a methodological commitment to examining how meanings about resilience are produced on the ground, in the rural communities that are frequently the target for resilience-building interventions. We seek to excavate and privilege the voices of those people who are often excluded from producing knowledge about their own communities. The articles in this issue come out of a collaboration between scholars at Cornell University and Oxfam America oriented towards generating a better understanding of well-being in rural communities around the globe. Ten field researchers, two project leaders, and two development practitioners worked together to elaborate a shared, participatory methodology that asked what people themselves understood as resilience, and what factors they identified as contributing to building resilience in their community. Field researchers worked to understand how people in rural communities experienced and conceptualised resilience, and thus focused the work on these subjective understandings. The articles in this volume demonstrate that paying attention to the grounded and embedded meaning-making around resilience reveals that resilience knowledge is itself a terrain of struggle, and thus resilience definitions, priorities or interventions are themselves political arenas.

In ‘Understanding Agrobiodiversity and the Rise of Resilience: Analytical Category, Boundary Concept, or Meta-Level Transition’ Karl Zimmerer examines the increasingly central role of resilience in new understandings of agrobiodiversity. He examines how meanings about resilience and agrobiodiversity are negotiations across a public–private boundary. Drawing on field studies in peasant and indigenous communities in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, Zimmerer argues that resilience in this context has several meanings and uses. As a category for social–ecological analysis, the estimation of resilience has become central to new agrobiodiversity understandings that now link genetics with social–ecological interactions. As a boundary concept, resilience is used as a guiding metaphor for bridging the epistemic boundaries between social and environmental realms. And as a meta-level transition, resilience requires a reflexivity and appreciation of complexity of agrobiodiversity. Social–ecological resilience perspectives value the voices of otherwise marginalised peoples, which infuses agrobiodiversity discussions with contestation as the priorities of relatively poor smallholder, indigenous, and peasant growers are often not easily reconciled with public conservation strategies or those invested in neoliberal style agrobiodiversity governance. Zimmerer suggests that agrobiodiversity resilience is negotiated across public and private lines, wherein the fugitive qualities of private seed and landscape ecologies protect agrobiodiversity, resist neoliberal forces and contribute to a more equitable distribution of benefits.

Paul Simonin (‘From Sea to Spirit: Resilience Conceptions in Coastal Communities of Kaledupa, Indonesia’) examines subjective understandings of resilience among fishing communities in Indonesia. He finds a strong integration of both ecological concepts and cultural or spiritual meanings in how these communities conceptualise resilience. Conceptions of hope, fear, and time – all influenced by spiritual beliefs – are particularly influential in Indonesia. These beliefs influence local ideas of the ‘future’, with a cyclical understanding of time rather than the linear concept of history captured in social–ecological systems theory. Meaning and knowledge formation around resilience happen in various ways – ways that are sometimes far outside of the types of considerations that Western development practitioners might be comfortable or familiar with.

Charis Boke, in ‘Resilience's Problem of the Present: Reconciling Social Justice and Future-Oriented Resilience Planning in the Transition Town Movement’, continues with the temporality theme. Through an examination of the Transition Town model and practise in Putney, Vermont, Boke explores how resilience-building activities in this context work to tie an imagined bucolic past to a feared future full of crisis, but in so doing overlook the need for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. She argues that resilience, as a future-oriented conceptual framework, has limited capacity for dealing with the social justice problems of the present, which reduces its usefulness as a stand-alone concept for organising and promoting change. Indeed, she argues, resilience thinking can actively stand in the way of the kind of work these activists seek to promote. Boke suggests that a more useful re-formulation of resilience would emphasise resilience as a set of relations. She draws on an ethics of care as a productive way of re-thinking the analysis of human relations and the practise of building socially just relationships in the future.

Brian Thiede (‘Resilience and Development Among Ultra-Poor Households in Rural Ethiopia’) examines subjective understandings of resilience in the highly resource-constrained context of agriculturalists in Kejima, Ethiopia. He, too, finds a temporal tension within resilience, suggesting that future-oriented resilience building comes at the expense of meeting short-term subsistence needs. Indeed, he suggests that building long-term resilience is nearly impossible in such a resource constrained context, and reports that many respondents suggested that resilience was contingent upon exit from the area. Thiede argues that resilience-based intervention and assessment in Ethiopia fails to overcome key limitations of already existing development discourses and practise, and further reinforces an individualistic view of welfare rather than adequately interrogating the structural causes of vulnerability, volatility, and shocks. Thiede identifies a need to think critically about the spatial and temporal scales at which resilience is facilitated or constrained.

Chaun Liao and Ding Fei (‘Resilience of What to What: Evidence from Pastoral Contexts in East Africa and Central Asia’) examine resilience through a comparative analysis of narratives among pastoralists in Ethiopia and China. They focus on local definitions of pastoral resilience to build surrogate indicators and to identify threats to pastoral resilience in these contexts. This work suggests that the operationalisation of resilience requires context-specific knowledge. Based on their research among pastoralists in Ethiopia and China, Liao and Fei identified three elements that were keys to subjective understandings of resilience: mobility, land use patterns and livelihood diversification. But they found that these three elements played out differently across households and contexts, such that livelihood diversification might lead to an exit from pastoralism for some individuals and challenges the resilience of pastoral livelihoods for others. Thus, they argue that questions such as ‘resilience of what to what’ are critical when analysing pastoral communities.

In ‘Tensions of Resilience: Collective Property, Individual Gain and the Emergent Conflicts of the Quinoa Boom’, Marygold Walsh-Dilley focuses on the question of ‘resilience of whom?’ Drawing on fieldwork in a Bolivian quinoa-producing village currently experiencing unprecedented prosperity, she examines two overlapping tensions between the individual and the collective. First, she uncovers discursive tensions as people describe their subjective understandings of resilience and whether it should be understood as belonging to individuals or collectives. Second, she analyses ongoing conflicts generated by individual uses of common resources and the efforts to mobilise collective governance institutions in response. Much of development-oriented resilience practise has identified the individual as the principal unit of analysis and target of intervention – a strategy that resonates with liberal and neoliberal political ideologies and social organisation and which potentially limits the possibilities for transformative public and political action. Paying attention to the dynamics between individual and collective interests is important, Walsh-Dilley argues, because it provides a means to both examine distributional effects of resilience-based interventions and to open up the possibilities for collective action.

Finally, Sara Keene examines how discourses influence our interpretation of resilience. In ‘Marijuana and the Limits of Knowledge: Implications for Economic Vulnerability and Resilience in Northern California’, Keene identifies two distinct discursive framings of marijuana – either as a ‘dangerous drug’ or a ‘medicine’ – and argues that these framings prevent consideration of the impacts of marijuana production on the resilience of the local economy. She thus calls for greater attention to the ways in which subjective meanings and discourses condition understandings of socio-economic vulnerability and resilience, treating both terms not as predetermined concepts, but as objects of analysis in and of themselves.

(Un)Defining resilience

These articles collectively expose how paying attention to the various understandings and meanings of resilience – what these meanings are and how they come to be – alert us to some of the tensions, trade-offs, politics and distributive effects that resilience interventions can have. This collection makes an important contribution to the literature on resilience by not taking the existence of resilience as a given but rather analysing it as a concept-in-formation. We suggest that the fuzziness of the concept, much bemoaned in the literature, does not make it meaningless but rather highlights how full of meanings it is. Interrogating those meanings in grounded contexts provides a productive opportunity to engage in a conversation about what is most important in development work.

The articles push this discussion forward by elevating a unique and often marginalised set of voices to the ongoing debates around resilience. They use these voices to open up and explore some of the contradictions inherent in building resilience, as it is commonly understood, at the community level. This collection encourages us to take seriously localised and located discourses of resilience to understand meaning-making in relation to development, well-being and the future.